NOTE: Homily by the late Karl Rahner, S.J., on the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, which we have celebrated the last couple days.
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All Saints day and All Souls day are the
feasts of every saint and of every soul who has died and
gone home into the eternal love of God. All of them and therefore
not only those already celebrated by name in the church’s feasts throughout the
year but also the silent, unknown ones who have departed as if they had never
even existed. There are no legends about them; their lives are recorded
neither in poetry nor in history, secular or ecclesiastical. Only
one person knows anything about these saints, and that of God. He has
inscribed their names in the book of life, which is the heart of his eternal
love.
But we are supposed to celebrate these
saints who are not known to us by name. How can we do this – really
do it, with life and zest – if not by lovingly remembering our dead?
They may already be forgotten by the world; perhaps their name is not
even inscribed on a gravestone. Yet they not only live on with God, but
also with us, in our hearts.
Let us then prepare our hearts for these
feasts of the dead who live with God. May our hearts be mindful of the
dead. Be still, O heart, and let all whom you have loved rise from the
grave of your breast. Is there no one among All Saints and All Souls for
you to celebrate? Have you ever come in contact with love and meekness,
goodness and purity and fidelity in a person? Not even in your mother, so
quiet and forgetful of herself? Nor in your patient father? Should
you say, no, I think you would be contradicting your heart, which has its own
experiences. It is not the heart’s experience to have met throughout life
only darkness and no light, only selfishness and no selfless kindness.
But if you have met faith, hope, and
love, kindness and pardon, great courage and fidelity in persons who now are
dead – a grain of virtue such as these is worth a mountain of selfishness
and vice – then you have met men and women whom your heart may seek with
God. Up, then, and celebrate the heart-feast of All Saints, of All
Souls – your saints, your beloved souls! Sorrow
and joy, grief and happiness are strangely blended into this feast. Just
as they are with the things of eternity. Celebrate an All Saints of peace
and loyalty. Of yearning and of faith. Celebrate your dead who are
still living.
Today, then, we want to remember before
God our dead, all those who once belonged to us and who have departed from us.
There are so many of them that we can by no means take them all at one
glance. If our celebration is to greet them all, we must go back in
memory over our path through life. When we go about it in this way, from
our point of view it is like a procession of persons marching down the street
of life.
At each moment, without bidding
farewell, someone or other silently withdraws form the procession and, turning
aside from the road, is lost in the darkness of the night. This
procession becomes smaller and smaller for each one of us, for the new person
constantly stepping onto our path through life only seems to be marching along
with us. To be sure, many are walking the same street, but only a few
walk together with each one of us. Strictly speaking, only
those who set out together with each one of us are really journeying together
with us. Only those who were with us at the very beginning of our journey
to God – only those who were and still are really close to our heart.
The others are traveling companions on
the same road; they are many, and they are constantly coming and going.
We greet each other, and give each other a helping hand, and then, no
more. But the real procession of each of our lives is made up of those
whom we really love. This procession is always becoming smaller and
quieter, until each one of us becomes silent once and for all, turns aside from
the road, and passes away without a farewell, never to return.
That is why our heart today is with
those who have already departed in just such a way. There are no
replacements for them; no other human being could really fill the vacancy left
by a loved one when she suddenly and unexpectedly departs and is at our side no
longer. In true love no one can replace the beloved, for true love loves
the beloved in those depths where each individual is uniquely and irreplaceably
herself. That is why each one of those who have passed away has taken the
heart with them, if death has trodden through our lives from beginning to end.
If someone has really loved and continues
to love, then even before his own death his life is changed into a life with
the dead. Could the lover forget her dead? If one has really loved,
then her forgetting and the fact that she has ceased weeping are not signs that
nothing has really changed, that she is just the same as before. They
are, rather, signs that a part of her own heart has really died with the loved
one, and is now living with the dead. That is why she can no longer
mourn. We live, then, with the dead, with those who have gone before us
into the dark night of death, where no one can work anymore.
But how are we supposed to be able to
live with the dead in the one reality of our mutual love; how are we to
celebrate a feast of all the holy dead? Is this possible simply because
God is the God of the living and not of the dead, because his word and even the
wisdom of this world tells us that these dead still live? Because we
loved the dead and still love them, we must be with them always. But are
they also with us? Do they belong to this love and to the celebration of
this love?
They have departed, they are silent.
No word from them reaches our ears; the gentle kindness of their love no
longer fills our heart. How quiet the dead are, how dead they
are! Do they want us to forget them, as we forget a casual acquaintance
on a trip, with whom we exchanged a few insignificant words? If life is
not taken away from those who depart this life in God’s love, but changed into
eternal, measureless, superabundant life, why then should it seem to us that
they no longer exist? Is the inaccessible light of God into which they
have entered so faint that it cannot penetrate to us down here? Does even
their love (and not only their bodies) have to abandon us in order to live with
God in his light? Does their silence imitate the silence of their God, to
whose home they have gone?
That is the way it is. For God is
silent just like the dead. For us to celebrate his feasts in our hearts
this silent God must certainly be with us, even though he seems so distant and
so silent. We certainly must love him, too, as we love our dead, the
distant and silent dead, who have entered into the night. Does he not
give to our love an intelligible answer when we call him to the feast of the heart,
and ask him for a sign that his love exists for us and is present to us?
And that is why we cannot lament the silence of the dead, for their
silence is only an echo of his silence.
But if we keep silent and meek, if we
listen to this silence of God’s, then we begin to grasp with a comprehension
that exceeds our own power to evoke or even to understand why both God and the
dead are so silent. Then it dawns on us that they are near us precisely
in our feast of the holy souls. God’s silence is the boundless sphere
where alone our love can produce its act of faith in his love.
If in our earthly life his love had
become so manifest to us that we would know beyond a shadow of a doubt what we
really are, namely, God’s own beloved, then how could we prove to him the daring
courage and fidelity of our love? How could such a fidelity exist at all?
How could our love, in the ecstasy of faith, reach out beyond this world
into his world and into his heart? He has veiled his love in the
stillness of his silence so that our love might reveal itself in faith.
He has apparently forsaken us so that we can find him.
For if his presence in our midst was
obvious, in our search for him we would find only ourselves. We must,
however, go out from ourselves, if we are to find him where he is really
himself. Because his love is infinite, it can dwell openly and radiantly
only in his own infinity; and because he wants to show us his infinite love, he
has hidden it from us in our finiteness, whence he calls out to us. Our
faith in him is nothing but the dark road in the night between the deserted
house of our life with its puny, dimly lit rooms, and the blinding light of his
eternal life. His silence in this world is nothing but the Earthly
appearance of the eternal word of his love.
Our dead imitate this silence.
Thus, through silence, they speak to us clearly. They are nearer to
us than through all the audible words of love and closeness. Because they
have entered into God’s life, they remain hidden from us. Their words of
love do not reach our ears because they have blended into one with the joyous
word of his boundless love. They live with the boundlessness of God’s
life and with his love, and that is why their love and their life no longer
enter the narrow room of our present life. We live a dying life.
That is why we experience nothing of the eternal life of the holy dead,
the life that knows no death. But just in this very way they also live
for us and with us. For their silence is their loudest cry, because it is
the echo of God’s silence. It is in unison with God’s word that it speaks
to us.
Over against the loud cries of our
drives, and over against the anxious, hasty protestations with which we mortals
assure ourselves of our mutual love, God’s word enwraps us and all our noisy
words in his life. This is the way he commands us to relinquish all
things in the daring act of loving faith, in order to find our eternal homeland
in his life.
And it is precisely in this way that the
silence of our dead also calls out to us. They live in his life, and that
is why they speak his words to us. They speak the word of the God of the
true life, the word that is far removed from our dying. The dead are
silence because they live, just as our noisy chatter is supposed to make us
forget that we are dying. Their silence is the word of their love for us,
the real message that they have for us. By this word they are really near
to us, provided only that we listen to this soundless word and understand it,
and do not drown it out through the noise of everyday life.
It is in this way that they are close to
us whose feast we celebrate today in the silent composure of the heart.
They are near us together with the silent God, the God of the silent
dead, the living god of the living. He calls out to us through his
silence, and they, by their silence, summon us into God’s life.
Let us therefore be mindful of our dead,
our living. Our love for them, our loyalty to them is the proof of our
faith in him, the God of everlasting life. Let us not ignore the silence
of the dead, the silence that is the most ardent word of their love.
This, their most ardent word, accompanies us today and every day, for
they have gone away from us in order that their love, having gone into God, may
be all the closer to us.
Be mindful of the dead, O heart.
They live. Your own life, the life still hidden even to you, they
live unveiled in eternal light. Our living who are with the God of life
cannot forget us dead. God has granted our living everything, for he has
given them himself. But he goes further and also grants them this favor:
that their silence will become the most eloquent word of their love for us, the
word that will accompany our love home to them, into their life and their
light.
If we really celebrate All Saints and
All Souls as the feast of faith, of love, of quiet remembering; if our life is
and is always becoming more and more a life of the dead who have gone before us
in the sign of faith into the dark night of death, where no one can work; then
through God’s grace our life becomes, more and more, a life of faith in his
light during the night of this Earthly life. Then we who are dying live
with the living who have gone before us into the bright, shining day of life,
where no one has to work, because God himself is this day, the fullness of all
reality, the God of the living.
When we stand by the graves, or when our
heart must seek distant graves, where perhaps not even a cross stands over them
any longer; when we pray, “Lord, grant them eternal rest, and may perpetual
light shine upon them”; when we quietly look up toward the eternal homeland of
all the saints and – from afar and yet no near – greet God’s light
and his love, our eternal homeland; then all our memories and all our prayers
are only the echo of the words of love that the holy living, in the silence of
their eternity, softly and gently speak into our heart.
Hidden in the peace of the eternal God,
filled with his own bliss, redeemed for eternity, permeated with love for us
that can never cease, they, on their feast, utter the prayer of their love for
us: “Lord, grant eternal rest to them whom we love – as never
before – in your love. Grant it to them who still walk the hard road
of pilgrimage, which is nonetheless the road that leads to us and to your
eternal light. We, although silent, are not closer to them than ever
before, closer than when we were sojourning and struggling along with them on
Earth. Grant to them, too, Lord, eternal rest, and may your perpetual
light shine on them as on us. May it shine upon them now as the light of
faith, and then in eternity, as the light of blessed life.”
Be mindful of the
dead, O heart. Call them into your heart today, listen to their silence,
learn from them the one thing necessary: celebrate the feast of your saints.
For then the God of all the living will be mindful of us who are dead,
and he will one day be our life, too. And there will be one, single,
eternal feast of all the saints.
